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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the miner-49er dept.

ASUS will sell a motherboard that can support 19 GPUs. The product is intended for cryptocurrency mining:

ASUS this week teased the new "B250 Mining Expert" which boasts all those slots because – as the name implies – its role in life is mining cryptocurrency.

The board can't do it all itself, of course. ASUS' preferred GPU is the P106, a variant of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060), 1,280-CUDA-core, 1,506MHz affair that can surge to 1,708 MHz when required and boasts 6GB of RAM. ASUS' version is shorn of anything to do with displaying video so that it can smoke hashes to cook cryptocurrency.

Do the math: 19 GPUS, 1,280 cores apiece ... this motherboard could end up hosting 24,320 cores before you fill the Intel LGA 1511 socket with a Skylake, Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake CPU. That chip's half-dozen or so cores are hardly worth counting!

The board is also equipped to slurp three power supplies, because all those GPUs are thirsty. There's also a capacitor dedicated to each PCIe slot to make sure the juice doesn't fluctuate and upset the precious mining machines. A mining-specific BIOS that lets you manage all those GPUs rounds things out.

What do you do with this after cryptocurrency mining is dead?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:33PM (2 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Thursday August 24 2017, @11:33PM (#558647) Homepage

    Doesn't need to.

    Rather than a super-duper gaming computer, it's literally just an off-loader.

    Upload the data to each card in turn. Uploaded the code. Let the cards run on their own cores/RAM until they come up with a solution. Return the solution.

    You'll probably find that this thing would suck for graphics etc., even if the graphics cards were normal cards for this reason.

    Unless all you're interested in is as many cores churning on supplied problems for as long as possible, this is going to have limitations that get in your way for everything else and make it useless.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 25 2017, @05:06PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 25 2017, @05:06PM (#558977)

    good for renderfarming. physics... mini super computers... anything that runs on gpus.

    • (Score: 2) by ledow on Saturday August 26 2017, @12:37PM

      by ledow (5567) on Saturday August 26 2017, @12:37PM (#559412) Homepage

      Render-farm, possibly.

      Physics, not if it has any kind of interaction on a large scale... it'll help but it won't do much.

      It's more useful for compute-clusters in general, but then it pulls far too much power for that, most likely, and the I/O does let it down again.

      Pretty much this is why people don't make these kinds of devices. It's just 19 GPUs with local memory and poor connectivity to everything else. It's an churner - upload problem, wait for solution, so long as it rarely needs to know or interact with ANYTHING else but the problem at hand.